The Armour Archive

I have lately seen a lot of museum pieces that seem odd to me and I would like to hear opinions about the pieces..

This was recently posted on facebook:



To me, the eye slots look like they are way to high up on the helmet. Is it the camera playing tricks or am I just wrong?

It looks good to me.

This sort of helmet always has the eyes higher than you might expect. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the skulls are very round, and there is only a sort of minimal spacing between helmet and head on the top. The second is that the chins are very sharp, and there is a lot of internal space there.

A side view of this helmet would tell more, but I am pretty sure it's OK.

Mac

Nothing leaps out at me either to scream that it is a fake. I expect a side view would make us all get a better feel for it.

Wade

I see. I expect to see the eye slot in the vertical center of the helmet so the whole proportion thing tricks my eyes then. I will add pictures of some of the other helmets that looks odd to me when I bump in to them..

[more complicated way of saying what Mac said] A key factor that misleads the eye when dealing with helms in this style is their extreme width. They are not dead round, but they give that impression when looked at from above. This extreme width effectively makes the distance between occularia and the top of the skull look shorter. If you distort the image so it looks narrower, the skull will look less shallow. Oh, and what Mac said about the chin, too.

The rest of the head-on view looks exactly Maximilian: wide between the visor hinges, and the bellows visor is a Maximilian feature.